Saturday Night Live

I've always liked the look of the Saturday Night Live scenario in Gaslands, as it's one where each team gets to show off its particular talents and you're chasing Audience Votes rather than position or kills, so there are different ways to win. However it's not a scenario to just select to play since, as with most Gaslands scenarios, it's possible to optimise teams for it.

Anyway, we always randomly determine a scenario, but in the years we've been playing on a Thursday night this one has never come up. Until yesterday.

In Saturday Night Live the cars are in an arena, and score victory points each time they pick up Audience Votes. So obviously each team will be looking to get Audience Votes via their sponsor's special ability, but there are also spot prizes, determined at random. These can be as simple as declaring a smash attack on another vehicle to ones involving other vehicles to wipe out or explode.

Here's the arena and the teams already in play.

Bailey ran his Idris super-car, The Smudge (wrongly called The Shimmer in a previous post)
Caesar ran two Idris vehicles - a buggy and a truck.
I ran two Maxxine cars.

Bailey and Caesar got Audience Votes for choosing the long template in early gear phases, whilst I got them for doing spins and slides in close proximity to another of my vehicles. Caesar quickly latched on to the fact that in order to score votes I needed two vehicles in play, and sent his truck to hunt me down.

Meanwhile Baily found some empty space and fired up the nitro, racking up some early Audience Votes. He also managed to clean up a few spot prizes - the green counter is the centre of the arena, and there's a possible prize for moving near it, for example. It came up, and Bailey got it.

Here is scoring more points - one for going fast, a spot prize for going up to 8 hazards and then a lucky one for selecting a hazardous movement template. Bailey really was scoring a lot of points.

Crashing into the side wall at speed was a mere inconvenience.

I'd had terrible difficulty getting my act together and had only scored a couple of points. This was the last you'll see of my pink car, Woman King. Not long afterwards Caesar rammed and destroyed it.

My other car, Ommadawn, did dump caltrops across the front of Caesar's buggy. That was fun.

Bailey's car wiped out and exploded. He got more Audience Votes for that.

Ommadawn ended up away from the main action, although being shot up by Caesar's truck.

Bailey was currently out of the running, but only a few VP away from the 15 needed to win. He'd pick them up fairly easily after he respawned. In the meantime Caesar started to stack up points, getting close to Bailey's total. Me? I managed very little.

Bailey respawned, and started moving fast again. He also collided with things.

But it was enough; wrecking his vehicle against a wall was enough to pick up the final Audience Vote he needed for victory.

This is a fun scenario that really tests how to play Gaslands. Knowing your team's abilities helps a lot, but working out how to get some of the spot prizes is helped by a knowledge of the rules (and sometimes by dumb luck). Since all teams pick up plenty of Audience Votes the game is also an exercise in knowing when and how to spend them to advantage yourself or disadvantage others.

The final scores were:

Bailey - 16VP

Caesar - 12VP
Me - 5VP

I'd love to do this one again.